2020 may just be ending, but key Republican senators have their eyes on 2024. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri seems happy to endanger the GOP’s chances at saving the Senate with the two Georgia runoff races, committing to objecting the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, surely with the Missouri senator’s focus on a higher prize. But after months of relative silence from Republicans dismayed with President Trump’s futile attempts to overturn the 2020 election results, Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska has risen to the occasion, dismantling Trump’s fallacious case and marking himself as the 2024 foil for all of Trump’s feckless foot soldiers.
“From where I sit, the single-most telling fact is that there a giant gulf between what President Trump and his allies say in public – for example, on social media, or at press conferences outside Philadelphia landscaping companies and adult bookstores – and what President Trump’s lawyers actually say in courts of law,” Sasse wrote in a scathing Facebook post. “And that’s not a surprise. Because there are no penalties for misleading the public. But there are serious penalties for misleading a judge, and the president’s lawyers know that – and thus they have repeated almost none of the claims of grand voter fraud that the campaign spokespeople are screaming at their most zealous supporters. So, here’s the heart of this whole thing: this isn’t really a legal strategy – it’s a fundraising strategy.”
Without naming names, Sasse then took to task “ambitious politicians” looking for a “quick way to tap into the president’s populist base.”
In other words, Hawley.
Hawley’s gambit marks him explicitly as the Trumpian loyalist so divorced from the greater GOP cause that he’s willing to tank Kelly Loeffler’s and David Perdue’s Senate bids with a ceremonial vote designed to divide the loyalties between a president and his party. It also implicitly means Hawley doesn’t actually believe Trump has a second shot at reelection, as he believes his own star will rise by claiming the mantle of Trumpism, whatever that means past an affectation of boorishness.
Hawley, who has spent much of the pandemic playing politics with everything from urgently needed coronavirus relief to the freedom of speech on the internet, has finally met his match, not just in chutzpah, but in the willingness to take a stand in anticipation for what will be a four-year primary. Sasse, the far-too-often handwringing academic of a principled conservative in a politician’s swamp, has finally spoken up for the millions of voters Trump’s loyalists wish to disenfranchise and make the case for his future relevance in the process.
Sasse is a brilliant man but a demonstrably unskilled politician. He navigated the Trump era somewhat poorly, wasting too much of his political capital on calling Trump out and not nearly enough on constraining his policy excesses. But if there were ever a moment for rhetorical candor to matter in the party, this would be it, and that Sasse is able to hold his colleagues’ feet to the fire with the confidence of a landslide reelection bodes well for his future odds.
Sasse may have little legislation to run on come 2024, but if he’s the first one to point out that the emperor’s new clothes don’t actually exist, he may have the spine to go all-in on a presidential bid regardless.
